It was so jammed inside the café it’s a wonder even its famed bagels had enough space to expand properly. It was the last hurrah for the St-Viateur Bagel Café on N.D.G.’s Monkland Ave., and some customers were on the verge of crying in their coffees — and bagels. “It’s like a shiva in here today … so many sad people,” noted filmmaker and longtime customer Ezra Soiferman, making an analogy with the Jewish mourning period. “But, at least, like at every good shiva, there are good bagels.” After 18 years, the café — an offshoot of the legendary, 62-year-old, St-Viateur Bagel Factory original in Mile End — closed shop Monday after its owners were unable to come to terms on a new lease with landlord Développement Métro Montreal Corporation. Buzz on the street is the landlord had asked for a significant raise in rent.

Motorists wait to use the oncoming traffic lane to avoid a pothole measuring seven inches deep and almost four feet across on Notre-Dame St. in Montreal on Feb. 7, 2019.Allen McInnis /
Montreal Gazette

Montreal’s opposition party is calling for an amendment to a provincial law that prevents drivers from claiming reimbursement for pothole damage to their tires or suspension. Avoiding potholes is “an extreme sport you could call an urban slalom,” Ensemble Montréal leader Lionel Perez said at a news conference at city hall. At the next council meeting, which starts Monday, the party will present a motion asking the city to press the Quebec government to amend the Cities and Towns Act. Since 1992, the law has exempted tires and suspension from damages citizens may claim for after hitting a pothole, he said. Since those are the parts most often damaged by potholes, the law is “profoundly unjust,” Perez said.

St-Lazare locavores pining for fresh eggs from their own backyards will soon be able to build the coops they’ve been dreaming of, if all goes well with a proposed bylaw change that would allow citizens to keep chickens in residential neighbourhoods. In Vaudreuil-Dorion, and even some urban Montreal boroughs, residents are allowed to keep chickens on their property, but in St-Lazare, coops are only permitted in areas with agricultural zoning. Even those keeping horses on spacious equestrian properties are technically prohibited from having a coop as well as a barn. But at the town council meeting on Feb. 19, St-Lazare formally began the process to amend its bylaws to allow backyard chickens.

Montrealers line up for fast food from mobile trucks in downtown Montreal on June 27, 2013.Dave Sidaway /
Montreal Gazette

Don’t go looking for food trucks in the Plateau because you won’t find them on the streets of one of the city’s hippest boroughs. Valérie Plante’s Projet Montréal administration announced outside city hall on Thursday morning it is loosening the rules for food trucks in an attempt to give the business a boost. A central tenet of the new policy is it will be up to the individual boroughs to manage the food trucks in their area. You might think the Plateau-Mont-Royal would be the ideal neighbourhood for food trucks. It has some of the most happening nightlife in the city and it has no shortage of well-to-do residents who have disposable income and have shown a tendency to be open to trying new things. But the Plateau administration headed by borough mayor Luc Ferrandez has refused to let food trucks operate on the streets of the borough since the trucks first began appearing in Montreal six years ago and they have no plans to change that policy.

Just as normalcy was returning to Quebec City’s largest mosque, its members find themselves reliving the horror of the Jan. 29, 2017, shooting that left six Muslim men dead. A massacre in Christchurch, New Zealand in which 49 people died in two mosques grimly echoes the Quebec City tragedy. As was the case in Quebec, the New Zealand attack was reportedly carried out by a heavily armed, anti-immigrant white man bent on killing Muslims. The suspect in Friday’s rampage, a 28-year-old white supremacist, appears to have been influenced by Quebec City shooter Alexandre Bissonnette, who was sentenced in February to life in jail without the possibility of parole for 40 years.

Quebec Islamic cultural centre president Boufeldja Benabdallah, right, reacts to the deadly shooting in New Zealand on Friday, March 15, 29019. “We again have to rethink security, vigilance and to relive the pain.”Jacques Boissinot /
THE CANADIAN PRESS

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